Judeo-Gascon
Judeo-Gascon | |
---|---|
Region | Bordeaux, Bayonne, South of Landes |
Ethnicity | Spanish and Portuguese Jews |
Latin | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | – |
Judeo-Gascon is a
Until recently, Judeo-Gascon was probably one of the least known dialects of Gascon and Occitan and the least studied from a linguistic point of view. Its first coverage in scholarship has been in Nahon (2017); its linguistic characteristics have been investigated in depth in Nahon (2018), alongside comprehensive critical editions of the surviving Judeo-Gascon texts.
History
After the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, some Iberian Jews, who were originally speakers of Portuguese and/or Spanish, settled in the South-West of France in Gascon-speaking areas. In the course of time, these Jews were linguistically assimilated to their Gascon-speaking environment, though Spanish was kept, alongside Hebrew, as a written language for administrative, liturgical, and literary purposes. The variety of Gascon spoken by the Jews, in a situation of diglossia with these languages, received a strong linguistic imprint that caused it to diverge from the Gascon dialects spoken by the coterritorial Christian populations. Additional influences of
Judeo-Gascon was still spoken in the early 20th century but disappeared quickly after the
It was superseded by a variety of French that retains a large number of lexical and morphological influences from Judeo-Gascon.[3] This variety of French with Judeo-Gascon substrate is still spoken nowadays by a few dozens of speakers, some of which still know a few sentences in Judeo-Gascon.[4]
Phonetics
The main phonetic feature of Judeo-Gascon, especially its Bayonne variety, is the realization as [e] of stressed and unstressed /e/, in contrast with its [œ] realization in the surrounding Western Gascon (also called gascon negue). This has been attributed by Nahon as an influence from the inland dialects or diglossia with Spanish.[5]
Lexical features
The most prominent feature of Judeo-Gascon is the high influx of loanwords from
Works
Most texts written in Judeo-Gascon date from the 19th and early 20th century. The only known earlier material are a few 18th-century Gascon nicknames borne by Jews in Gascony.[7] All the other documents have been published and commented by Nahon. They include:
- three pieces of para-liturgical poetry, sang at the occasion of the Purim holiday. Two of them have been collected orally by Nahon in the 2010s, and are the last surviving specimens of Judeo-Gascon oral literature.[8]
- several satirical works in verse and prose, including an important satire composed in 1837 for the inauguration of the main synagogue of Bayonne
- a Jewish holiday calendar (Calende yudiu) dated 1928, the last printed work in Judeo-Gascon.[9]
- private correspondence.
Sources
- Nahon, Peter (2017), "Diglossia among French Sephardim as a motivation for the genesis of 'Judeo-Gascon'" (PDF), Journal of Jewish Languages, 5 (1): 104–119, S2CID 193824976. Link to full-text.
- Nahon, Peter (2018), Gascon et français chez les Israélites d'Aquitaine. Documents et inventaire lexical (in French), Paris: Classiques Garnier, ISBN 978-2-406-07296-6.
- Beider, Alexander (2019), "Review of: Gascon et français chez les israélites d'Aquitaine. Documents et inventaire lexical, written by Nahon, Peter", Journal of Jewish Languages, 7 (1): 279–291, S2CID 204715582.
- Minervini, Laura (2021), "Judeo-Romance in Italy and France (Judeo-Italian, Judeo-French, Judeo-Occitan).", Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics., ISBN 978-0-19-938465-5.
- Nahon, Peter (2020), "La singularisation linguistique des juifs en Provence et en Gascogne : deux cas parallèles ou opposés ?", La Linguistique, 56: 87–113, S2CID 216486816 Link to full-text.
See also
References
- ^ Nahon 2018, p. 24-25, 353-355.
- ^ Nahon 2018, p. 96-97.
- ^ Nahon 2018, p. 85-323.
- ^ Nahon 2020, p. 94-95.
- ^ Nahon 2018, p. 50-51.
- ^ Nahon 2018, p. 50, 68, 71.
- ^ Beider 2019, p. 287.
- ^ Nahon 2018, p. 71-77.
- ^ Nahon 2018, p. 77-79.